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inspiration & influence

creativity inspiration & influence

Joy – 18 inspiring quotes on enjoying what you do and love

February 16, 2018

Joy

Joy is my word for the year for 2018. Here are 18 quotes about joy, spirit and soulful work sparking my year. I hope they inspire you too.

Choosing a word for the year is like deciding on a destination for how you want to feel but not knowing how it will play out. It’s like setting an intention for feeling the tone of the year with no plan for the details. Inviting the energy of a word into your life, you wait to see how it unfolds and manifests.

PASSION was my word for the year for 2017. It was such an inspiring way to get back to what I love as a guiding force in my life. I shared 17 quotes about passion about the driving energy of doing what you love. Last year was a challenging journey which took me back to the heart of what I love as the map and soul of its next steps.

I discovered passion was about feeling your authentic heart, in my case writing, and getting it into its rightful place in your life. It was about following my intuition more deeply and finding a vision that went beyond the everyday. Moreover, it was a guide for transition in a year of crossing over to a new place, sensing potential, seeing opportunity and knowing how to combine my skills in new ways. It was about learning to play bigger and weave all that has happened to me into a book, a new way of living, a new career, a creative life. In there also was an understanding of my uniqueness, the elements that combine as passions within me. As Meryl Streep reminds us:

What makes you different and weird, that’s your strength. 

Finding joy

So in turning the corner into 2018 after a challenging time, joy was beckoning me. Sometimes you can take a while to work through your word for the year; other times it arrives, more obviously and insistently. And then there are synchronicities also, like the card my daughter gave me for Christmas. It was a beautifully crafted message of JOY made from handpainted Egyptian papyrus. This sealed the deal perfectly.

As often happens with your word of the year, you have a sense of its meaning but a deeper dive yields surprises and connections. And there is serendipity and further synchronicity too.

This week via an inspiring webinar on Energy Matters in Coaching with Meg Mann I was introduced to the work of David R Hawkins. In particular, we were shown his map of the scale of consciousness as we progress through achieving greater levels of consciousness. And my eye zeroed in on JOY sitting right up near the top described by way of self-view as “complete” and emotion as “serenity”.

David R Hawkins says of the energy of this phase:

As we move up towards this level, inner joy, quiet, and inner knowingness begin to take place. Within this energy field, we connect with something that is rocklike and ever present.

So this year’s focus is no lightweight endeavour but one that has enormous potential to calm and ground me. I knew choosing joy this year was always going to be a challenging task and this scale just helped highlight this.

Being unapologetically joyful

As part of a Goddess Roadtrip Sydney workshop recently on ‘being seen’, we were asked by Jade McKenzie to stand up and say to the group what we were unapologetically going to be this year. Given my focus for the year, I chose “joyful”, but when I stood up to say the words “This year I will be unapologetically joyful…”, I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth. I was so mired in grief after the very recent loss of my mother. Eventually, I did say the words with the support of a room of beautiful women who held space for me, quietly, as I got there. But in this moment, I realised the intensity and depth of exploration in this journey of learning about joy this year. In part, it’s about allowing the juxtaposition of grief and joy in my life, something that can seem an uncomfortable fit just now.

Joy

Quotes about joy

I love quotes. The distilled wisdom of others in the form of words we can hold, repeat, learn from and reflect on is a balm and portal for me.

I found the 17 quotes on PASSION last year were a place to start from, a way to begin to explore the terrain of what it meant. Frequently, I returned to those words as I did to the Pinterest page I created on PASSION. Both are great ways to unravel the multiple meanings and nuances of words as we seek to explore them in our lives.

So to commence my exploration of JOY in 2018, here are 18 quotes about JOY to begin to tease out its contours and character for this year’s journey. I hope you find some inspiration for your journey this year.

“We cannot cure the world of sorrows but we can choose to live in joy.” – Joseph Campbell

“If all you did was just look for things to appreciate, you would live a joyous, spectacular life.” – Abraham-Hicks

“Be content with what you have, rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” – Lao Tzu 

“The body heals with play, the mind heals with laughter and the spirit heals with joy.” – Proverb

“Feelings are just visitors. Let them come and go.” – Mooji

“Joy comes to us in ordinary moments. We risk missing out when we get too busy chasing down the extraordinary.” – Brene Brown

“Joy is the best makeup. But a little lipstick is a close runner-up.” – Anne Lamott

“Strive not to get more done, but to have less to do.” – Francine Jay

“Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud.” – Maya Angelou 

“When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” – Rumi

“Your joy is where you locate your white hot Truth – your pure-burning is-ness, from where you have the creative power to turn thought into matter.” – Danielle LaPorte

“Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.” – Marianne Williamson

“You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.” – C. S. Lewis

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.” – Annie Proulx

“Don’t wait for everything to be perfect before you decide to enjoy your life.” – Joyce Meyer

“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” – Oscar Wilde

“JOY is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and self forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the street, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.” – David Whyte

Do read the whole David Whyte’s beautiful meditation on JOY from which these words come. It is pure magic. They are such a balm for the soul. It seems like much of this work on joy is about spirit, inner stillness and soul, quiet writing perhaps. I welcome joy in as we venture forward together getting to know each other in a deeper way this year.

Share your thoughts

Which is your favourite quote from these ones? Or do you have another quote or thought on joy that inspires you? What does joy mean to you? Would love to hear – share your thoughts in the comments!

Keep in touch

Sign up + get your copy of my free ebook ’36 Books that Shaped my Story: Reading as Creative Influence’

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Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. There are regular posts on tarot, intuition, influence, passion, creativity, productivity, writing, voice, introversion and personality type assessment.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

How I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention to make the most of this year

The unique voice of what we love

Exploring magic as the heart of creative inspiration

Joy

Image of me above by David Kennedy photography with thanks.

creativity inspiration & influence

Secret superpowers for creative inspiration and energy

February 7, 2018

Secret superpowers

The creative practices in my tool-kit I plan to use to manifest energy and intention to make the most of this year – part 3. This week – secret superpowers!

We all need a magic tool-kit of practical tools, workbooks, teachers, coaches, connections and community. This helps us make the most of our desires, plans and intentions.

First, we need to reflect on where we’ve been and what we’ve learnt. Then we need to plan and set intentions. And then we need to make them happen with practical action steps.

And the magic web that surrounds all of this is the company we keep, the books we read and the tools we choose to help manifest energy and intention in the best way possible.

So here’s part 3 of my tool-kit for how I plan to manifest energy and intention to make the most of this year. This focuses on the secret superpower in my creative practices toolkit. I hope it inspires you to better recognise or build your own creative resources for this year. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Secret superpowers

Some creative practices are more obvious than others. Others are like secret superpowers, so secret sometimes we don’t even realise or acknowledge their power. These practices can be so natural and woven into our daily life that we fail to realise their influence on us. Stepping back though, we can see that these practices have a subtle yet powerful impact especially when we engage with them over time. Others might be areas we are learning about so their effect can be felt as a ripple gently flowing into and through our lives.

So here is my list of secret superpowers for this year:

  1. Reading, reading, reading
  2. Swimming – and other exercise
  3. This year’s planner of choice
  4. Working with crystals

And here is a bit more about why they are such powerful practices in my life now and heading into this year.

Secret superpowers

Reading, reading, reading

Reading is such a secret superpower and an everyday activity for many of us that we can take for granted. So important to me as a source of creative influence, I chose to focus on this for the free ebook gift for signing up to Quiet Writing. In my ‘36 Books that Shaped my Story‘ ebook, I take a deep dive into the books that have helped to shape my life because reading does this for us in a myriad of ways.

Every book we read teaches us something and influences us. It might be the comfort reading of a novel and appreciating the gift of this at a tough time. Perhaps it’s a non-fiction book that has a huge impact and helps us reorient our thinking as Tara Mohr’s ‘Playing Big’ did for me recently. Each book we engage with is a gift to value and the challenge is to harness this most magical of secret superpowers so we can make the most of it.

Making reading a priority instead of it being pushed aside by social media in this age of distraction is a powerful choice. Learning to read more efficiently, creatively and actively can help immensely with our growth and creative productivity. Enjoying reading and working its pleasures and practicalities as one of our secret superpowers has the most amazing return on the investment of our time. And with audiobook and ebook options, reading has never been so accessible or available. Harness its energies to help craft your story! And stay tuned for some Quiet Writing deeper dive inspiration into your reading history and legacy soon.

Secret superpowers

Swimming – and other exercise

I’ve written about how swimming was such a big shift in feeling stronger and fitter last year in my post, 10 amazing life lessons from swimming in the sea. This was one of the most popular posts on Quiet Writing last year so clearly this connected with people. The amazing life lessons are about the fact that swimming and any form of exercise is about so much more than the exercise itself.

Whether it’s the camaraderie or the solo effort, the building of resilience, the pushing of barriers, the learning from persisting or the physical feeling you get from the activity, the sum of the parts results in a secret superpower that’s hard to define.

Swimming has helped me to improve my breathing as an asthma sufferer and strengthen my arms and cardio performance. It helped me with self-care and sorting out many things in the gentle rhythm of stroke after stroke. It’s been a huge but subtle factor in keeping in movement in a challenging year.

I have two tips regarding exercise as one of the best secret superpowers.

Firstly, find a form of exercise that you love that works for you. And in working this out, go back to what you loved as a child. I went back to swimming as a result of coaching and reflecting on how I loved swimming as a child but didn’t like chlorine pools and doing laps. Soon after, I bumped into a friend in town who told me about the local swimming group that swims in the ocean three times a week. And so I now swim a kilometre in the sea three times a week and I love it. Who would have thought? Not me. But now if I don’t go, I miss it terribly.

Secondly, find a form of exercise that suits your personality type. Stephanie Stokes Oliver in ‘Seven Soulful Secrets’ suggests as examples:

  • fitness classes, team sport and one-on-one games for social types
  • walking, running, cycling, skating, swimming, skiing and weight training as solitary pursuits
  • rock-climbing or training for a marathon if you like adventure or challenging yourself.

This is so true! Swimming is the perfect exercise for introverts; you can still swim with a group or have coffee afterwards for the social side. But it’s head down and in your own world when you are swimming and that’s perfect for me. Find the exercise secret superpowers for your personality type or personal needs and this will be great motivation.

sea swimming

This year’s planner of choice

I don’t know about you but the planner I choose to accompany me through the year is always a big decision. Whilst we might have our digital calendars, many of choose to have a planner to help us with the big picture planning and the day to day work in bringing it to fruition. This is where we are really working creatively and manifesting energies to make the most of the year.

Lately, I seem to be changing my planners depending on my focus for the year. This year I have chosen to work with Nicole Cody’s ‘The Year of M.E. Planner‘ with M.E. standing for ‘Manifesting Energies’. As Nicole says of her planner:

The Year of ME Planner allows you to create your own map – to a life that is intuitive, intentional and purposeful. ME stands for Manifesting Energies, but it also stands for you. This is about YOU mindfully creating a life more aligned with your dreams.

This planner integrates intuitive practices such as crystals and tarot and oracle into its pages as well as month to month running sheets to capture actions. It’s only early February, but I think working with this intuitive planner will be one of the key secret superpowers for my year.

secret superpowers

Working with crystals

Working with crystals is a newer practice for me, something I’ve dabbled in but not worked on consistently. It turns out Nicole Cody is also a crystal farmer – so I signed up for her crystal pack aligned with ‘The Year of Me’. This means I have a set of beautifully prepared and aligned crystals for working with this year’s energies. Each month, there are two crystals aligned to the energies of the month so it’s an opportunity to learn about crystals in practice as well as to integrate them into the year’s planning and intention setting.

This month’s crystals, for example, are Banded Agate and Sunstone. ‘The Year of Me Planner’ explains that:

Banded Agate creates a sense of safety, peace and belonging. It also helps to anchor change. Sunstone helps us to sit in a place of abundance thinking so that we can see blessings and possibilities in our life.

Working with these crystals in an integrated way has a sense of working with secret superpowers that I am still learning. I’ve always loved the solidity of rocks and geology and so it’s fascinating to connect with this grounded and spiritual energy at a time of change this year.

secret superpowers

So that’s part 3 of how I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention this year. I look forward to learning about what these secret superpowers have to teach me as part of my toolkit and plan to manifest energy in 2018. Along with coaching, writing, personality, tarot and many other practical resources, I feel ready for making the most of this year’s potential!

How about you?

I’d love to hear about your secret superpowers and supports for how you plan to manifest energy in 2018! Share your tips and plans in the comments or via social media.

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can download my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

How I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention to make the most of this year

Creative practices in my toolkit to make this most of this year’s energies

Practical tools to increase writing productivity

20 practical ways of showing up and being brave (and helpful)

Intuition, writing and work – eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

Images by me except for:

Feature image of me by the fabulous Lauren at Sol + Co

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creativity inspiration & influence planning & productivity

Creative practices in my toolkit to make the most of this year’s energies

January 26, 2018

creative tool-kit

The creative practices in my tool-kit I plan to use to manifest energy and intention to make the most of this year – part 2.

We all need a magic tool-kit of practical tools, workbooks, teachers, coaches, connections and community. This helps us make the most of our desires, plans and intentions.

First, we need to reflect on where we’ve been and what we’ve learnt. Then we need to plan and set intentions. And then we need to make them happen with practical action steps.

And the magic web that surrounds all of this is the company we keep, the books we read and the tools we choose to help manifest energy and intention in the best way possible.

So here’s part 2 of my tool-kit for how I plan to manifest energy and intention to make the most of this year. This focuses on the creative practices in my tool-kit. I hope it inspires you to better recognise or build your own creative resources for this year. You can read part 1 here.

Becoming a life coach

Becoming a life coach through the fabulous Beautiful You Coaching Academy was a big focus in 2017 as I moved through a major life transition. I’m shifting from a 30+ year career in the government sector to a more self-driven creative business focus. It’s been an exciting shift, moving little by little in a challenging couple of years. But I’m ready now to launch more fully into my life coaching business focused on creativity and career coaching. And I can’t wait.

Becoming a life coach builds on my body of work over many years as a teacher, adult educator, leader in vocational education, online learning specialist and strategic policy adviser. In all of these roles, I focused on making a difference, creativity, innovation, mentoring others, leadership and self-leadership. I bring all of this experience into my coaching work to help women create a more fully-rounded, whole-hearted story and life, just as I have done.

You can work with me in 2018 – just send me an email at terri@quietwriting.com and I’ll send you further information.

Being coached yourself

Becoming a life coach also means working on yourself and your own development in an ongoing way. I’ve experienced the value of coaching myself over the past two years as I’ve made this transition. I realised I could no longer stay where I was. It was no longer serving me and my creative heart was calling me. Life coaching helped me make the plan for a new creative path.

creative tool-kit

Learning the value of being coached and putting it into practice has been a key platform of my creative living toolkit in the past few years. It helps keep the focus on your authentic desires, front and centre.

So to help me in this year, I’ve joined up with Caroline Donahue’s group coaching program, the Coffee Shop Writers Group, to make sure my writing gets done as the authentic heart of Quiet Writing. I can talk about writing all day but unless I am doing it, it’s all pretty hollow! Working with fellow writers in the context of an online, international support team and with an inspiring writing coach as our lead is a perfect way to get my priority work done. Sometimes we need to carve out the time and prioritise support for ourselves in this way. And life coaching in some way shape or form is always a fabulous investment in yourself, with an excellent return on that investment in so many ways.

Writing, writing, writing

Did I mention writing? Linked to the above, writing is the heart of Quiet Writing – my creative practice. It’s how I start my days via Morning Pages, writing to settle into the day, reflect and make plans. Then there’s blogging here regularly, guest blogging including at WorkSearch and Life Reaction, as well as drafting books, with one well on the way at 70K words at this point. I am so looking forward to taking my writing into the editing and self-publishing phase this year.

Personality type work

A key part of Quiet Writing is understanding yourself and your personality type and how it works as a guide to wholehearted self-leadership. Understanding my Jung/Myers-Briggs INTJ personality was a critical step for me in my life. Working through this with a certified personality type practitioner and coach enabled me to proceed with fuller self-knowledge. I embraced my strengths instead of seeing them as weaknesses and learnt to work them. It also helped me understand where I can be more well-rounded by working on my less preferred cognitive functions.

Because all of this made such a difference for me, I’ve skilled up in the area of personality type to become a certified practitioner and share this insight with others.

This knowledge of personality type as part of my creative practices tool-kit weaves its way into everything I do. I will be offering personality type assessment in a standalone offering with one hour’s intensive 1:1 coaching, as well as the option to work through personality type as a lead into a 6 session coaching series for a deeper dive. As with coaching, personality work is an ongoing journey of understanding yourself. I look forward to sharing my knowledge in this exciting area in creative and new ways this year.

Energy healing, channelling and spirituality

Activating my energy, healing and spirituality was a priority last year and continues into this year – and let’s face it, why not forever! I’ve been working with Amber Adrian, storyteller, writer, channeller and energy healer for nearly two years now. It’s the quiet backbone of my life as I seek a deeper spirituality and engage with guides, the sacred creative and energy healing.

It’s hard to describe the power of this connection in supporting me and unleashing magic and creativity. As Amber says in recent communication about magic:

Magic simply flows in, once you’ve given spirit (god, the universe, your angels, your higher self) a doorway. A window. Even a crack. Give them a bit of room and they’re on it.

Open up a new highway for them and they’ll work astonishing miracles with you and your life and your dreams. Because they want you to have everything you desire – everything you want to do, be, create, have, and experience in your life here.

You just need to give magic room to step in.

So part of my creative practices tool-kit is making space for magic. Because as I said in my last post via Roald Dahl:

Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

creative practices

Being in rhythm and working with lunar cycles

Another key part of my creative practices tool-kit is working with the cycles of the moon. Dr Ezzie Spencer’s fabulous Lunar Abundance website and book ‘An Abundant Life’ provided rich input last year. It helped me be more aware of the cycles of the moon as part of my creative practices. I also worked with Ezzie as part of her group coaching Book Whispering project in 2017 to better connect with rhythms and cycles for creativity. This helped me get my book draft well underway as a lead into NaNoWriMo where I eventually wrote 50K words in one month.

Working with lunar cycles and the yin and yang phases is now a central part of my creative practices helping me to set and realise powerful intentions. I connect it with tarot for a fabulous intuitive deep dive at key times like the New Moon and Full Moon.

Working with intuition via tarot and oracle

Working with tarot and oracle cards as an intuitive tool for tapping into wisdom and insight is one of Quiet Writing’s core creative practices. I learnt about these areas more, developed my daily practice and then shared it publicly from June to December last year on Instagram. This was an excellent support and intuitive learning process that people valued. I learnt so much from it including about visual elements of my creative practices and social media work, but it was very time-consuming. And if I am going to get my business up, life-coaching sessions happening regularly, and write my book and see it published, I needed to work out a more sustainable way to approach this.

So I am sharing weekly Tarot Narrative readings on Quiet Writing here and also via Instagram and Facebook. This creative practice helps me focus my intentions and work with manifesting energies. And as with my daily readings, it’s a way of sharing intuitive guidance with others including key books, quotes and thoughts to support your creative practices. This week’s reading is about exploring magic.

I’m planning to gather up all my Tarot Narrative readings from 2017 into an ebook for each month for reference for readers. Even though they are an intuitive reading at a point in time, the thoughts and references are timeless and given the work and hours spent, it makes sense to share in this form. They will be part of the soon to come Wholehearted Inspiration Library and free to Quiet Writing subscribers. So do sign up to Quiet Writing (pop your email in the box to the right or below) so you will know when the free library is live – as well as other opportunities. Plus you’ll get my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – so lots of inspiration for your creative practices tool-kit.

 

creative practices

 

So that’s part 2 of my creative practices tool-kit and how I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention this year. Next week, I’ll tell you about three special superpowers I’ll be tapping into this year for extra focus and input.

I’d love to hear what’s in your creative practices tool-kit! Share your tips and plans in the comments or via social media.

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can download my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

How I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention to make the most of this year’s energies

Practical tools to increase writing productivity

The courage to show up

20 practical ways of showing up and being brave (and helpful)

Intuition, writing and work – eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

Images by me except for:

Feature image of me by the fabulous Lauren at Sol + Co

inspiration & influence introversion intuition

Exploring magic as the heart of creative inspiration

January 22, 2018

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

Roald Dahl

A Quiet Writing deep-dive Tarot Narrative each Monday to share intuitive guidance, wisdom and insights from aligned books – for the week and anytime…

This week: exploring magic!

Exploring magic

Theme for the week beginning 15 January

The theme for this week to guide our overall focus is from Lisa McLoughlin’s Life Design Cards. With their emphasis on ‘weave a different story’, these cards align so well with Quiet Writing’s focus on ‘creating your story’.

The theme and card for this week is 48. Stay bewitched by your own consciousness

Exploring magic

This card immediately made me think of ‘introverted Intuiting’ – a cognitive function that tends to be the primary way of working for INTJ and INFJ Jung/Myers-Briggs personality types, but one that we all can access for perspective and meaning-making.

As neuroscientist, Dario Nardi, describes it in his book, ‘8 Keys to Self-Leadership’:

At the core of introverted Intuiting is a metaperspective – the highest level or the most flexible frame of mind or form of behaviour that each of us currently has access to. One metaperspective is our own mind’s workings: we can shut out the world, quiet our minds, and ask our unconscious to take us to a new level of awareness. (p73)

Key to introverted Intuiting is focusing on and working in the language of “symbols, archetypes, totems, and their abstractions, such as visual models.” (p 73).

This week calls us to work from inside ourselves, go deeply, find our own language and symbolism and play with creative inspiration, exploring magic.

As the guidebook for Life Design Cards suggests for this card: “Through meditation, observe your mind observing the world. Play out creative inspiration with art, pure fantasy and dreams.”

So in terms of themes for this week, it’s a good time for exploring magic via collage, poetry, looking at symbols in our lives and businesses, making art and seeing where our intuition takes us for creative inspiration.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 22 January

Exploring magic

Tarot Narrative: Exploring the magic of creativity

You’re at the end of one part of your journey, completing key steps, signing off, finishing up. You’re also at the portal of a new adventure with opportunities opening up. At this time, root and ground yourself in the stillness of creative inspiration and the flow of your inner mind and intuition. You’re broadening out with confidence, initiating projects, capturing ideas from the fertile soil of within. Work boldly with intuition and discipline as your guides now.

Reading notes: Cards: Knight of Swords and King of Cups from the Sakki Sakki Tarot and #45 Time To Go from Wisdom of the Oracle.

Book notes:

…we do all this because it fulfills us and makes our hearts sing. But when we explore the deeper reasons behind this time and effort, there is something even more important than what these pursuits do for us, and that is our desire to shine a light in the world that others might need to take their own daring leaps.

Christine Mason Miller, Desire to Inspire: Using creative passion to transform the world (p10)

Are you finding ideas are coming to you easily lately like it’s a very fecund and fertile time? I  certainly am and the challenge is to catch these thoughts before they disappear or we forget them. It’s easy to think we will remember a key concept or intuitive connection, only to find we don’t later as our perspective shifts. So frustrating.

Only yesterday, I found myself capturing ideas for a Quiet Writing ecourse. This has been the plan for a while as a signature piece for Quiet Writing and it’s something I’ve worked on before over time. But it came together really clearly yesterday and I can see it as a whole. Importantly though, I had I had to stop and take the time to listen within and feel that ‘desire to inspire’.

Exploring magic

Exploring magic

I’ve had to realise too this is no longer just about me; it’s about how I can share my experience and help others shine. As I move on in my life to a new way of working as a career and creativity coach, I need to connect the dots of my experience and share what makes my heart sing to benefit others.

The word ‘magic’ keeps popping up too.

I need to be exploring magic in the heart of creative inspiration and believing in that magic, as Roald Dahl reminds us in the words above from his last story, ‘The Minpins’.

This is my favourite quote of all time because it captures the interplay between what we see and notice and connect. And then how we bring it to life in our quiet spaces and creative work to enrich the lives of others as well as ourselves. It is the heart of it all really, certainly the heart of Quiet Writing and the coaching and writing that sit within its focus.

So for this week, it’s a great time for digging deep into your introverted Intuiting perspective and seeing what surfaces in stillness or creative play. Taking that time to journal, work with visuals, mindmap, play with symbolism or write poetry can be a rich way to connect disparate themes into something new. And make sure you are balancing that internal, introspective work with a touch of Knight of Swords boldness and action!

I’d love to hear if you are feeling these introverted creative energies and possibilities too and what is coming up from within as magic you can share with others. What practices seem to be working for you for helping those pieces connect and shine in new forms?

All best wishes for this week for enjoying the pleasure of intuitive creativity and exploring magic. And let me know what you think of this post and the idea of weekly Tarot Narratives!

? by Lauren, Sol + Co

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can download my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

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If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

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How knowing your authentic heart can make you shine

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How I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention to make the most of this year

January 19, 2018

manifest energy

This is part 1 of my toolkit for how I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention to make the most of this year!

We all need a magic tool-kit of practical tools, workbooks, teachers, coaches, connections and community. This helps us make the most of our desires, plans and intentions.

First, we need to reflect on where we’ve been and what we’ve learnt. Then we need to plan and set intentions. And then we need to make them happen with practical action steps.

And the magic web that surrounds all of this is the company we keep and the tools we choose to help manifest energy and intention in the best way possible.

I like to think of it as ‘the examined life’. Perhaps it’s my INTJ personality that loves this deep dive into both intuition and structure, but as Socrates wisely said,

The unexamined life is not worth living.

In contrast, I choose an examined life that helps me have creative courage to move in small steps within a plan and vision that gives me direction.

So here’s part 1 of my tool-kit for how I plan to manifest energy and intention to make the most of this year.

Practices I’ve engaged in over time to manifest energy

My manifesting tool-kit for negotiating the beginning of the year has evolved over time. There are some practices I’ve engaged in over a few years that have become key tools for reviewing and setting energies and intention. And making magic! These are all by powerful, creative women sharing their energy to help me manifest mine. I share them with you so we can all manifest our unique energy into the opportunities of this year or any cycle.

Unravel Your Year – with Susannah Conway

I’ve been unravelling with Susannah Conway for a long time and working through her free annual ‘Unravel Your Year‘ workbook for at least five years! The process and workbook take you through reflections on the previous year and works with awareness and intentions to set a magical path for the new year. One of the best aspects of doing this work on an annual basis is that you can see where previous years have taken you. Or where you keep setting the same intentions in line with your dreams but not being in action to achieve them.

As per the oft-repeated quote:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results…

…I found over time that I was setting similar intentions year after year and not achieving them.

Work was the overwhelming priority. I found myself setting the same goals about a creative life and writing, expressing the same desires each year and not hitting them. It wasn’t until I made real change, making space and plans for shifting to part-time work in 2016, that I started to make traction towards my desires. The ‘Unravel Your Year’ workbook and process helps you identify over time how your plans and actions can align to best manifest energy.

Manifest energy

Goddess of the Year

For a few years now, I’ve worked with Amy Palko’s fabulous My Word Goddess Readings. Available until 31 January 2018 for this year, they are a deep and spiritual insight into guiding Goddess energies for the year. It’s a way of learning about Goddesses and their energy too. I’ve just engaged in two inspiring events as part of the amazing Goddess Roadtrip when it came to Sydney. So I am feeling so energised about how Goddesses energy and divine feminine guides can be pivotal in our lives, creativity and businesses.

Last year I worked with Pele, Goddess of Irrepressible Passion, and it was all about getting back to being wholehearted and what I love as the driving force for my life. And encouraging others to honour this same journey. This year, I’m working with the crone energy of Hecate, the Goddess of the Crossroads and Compassionate Witnessing. Goodness knows this is a year of crossroads as my I face redundancy and finally embark on the creative professional career I have been desiring and shaping for so long. My new creativity and career coaching business is fuelled by a spirit of compassionate witnessing. So I look forward to working with Hecate this year in my life coaching and writing work in the world and with you here.

manifest energy

Word of the Year

Setting a word for the year is another valuable practice that helps manifest energy and intention. Susannah Conway has a Find Your Word for 2018! workbook that can support you in this process. The practice is also included in Amy Palko’s Goddess work above, in line with the manifest energy of specific guiding goddesses. Or your word might be something that evolves naturally out of your experiences – something you are searching for or that is searching for you.

My word for 2018 is JOY. After the most challenging of years in 2017 supporting my mother in her tough battle with metastatic breast cancer and with her sad passing away on Christmas Day, joy has been so hard to come by. I just gave Christmas spirit generally a pretty wide berth last year. Balancing even the thought of joy with grief is hard to countenance at present. But I know that finding deeper joy, playfulness, fun, laughter and happiness again are all central to this year’s journey.

This wasn’t a hard choice this year despite the contradictions. I didn’t need to work through a workbook or think too much. My daughter gave me this gorgeous card, made from hand-painted Egyptian papyrus at Christmas so that sealed the deal in the most lovely of synchronous ways. This beautiful card sits above me as I write here at my desk as a reminder of my focus for this year in everything I do.

Manifest energy

So that’s part 1 of how I plan to manifest energy, joy and intention this year. I look forward to sharing more practical tips in my post next week about my toolkit and plan to manifest energy in 2018. This will include coaching, writing, intuitive tools, exercise and the planner I will use – and many other practical resources for making the most of this year’s potential.

I’d love to hear about your Word of the year, Goddess of the year or other supports for how you plan to manifest energy in 2018! Share your tips and plans in the comments or via social media.

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can download my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

Practical tools to increase writing productivity

The courage to show up

20 practical ways of showing up and being brave (and helpful)

Intuition, writing and work – eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

Images by me except for:

Feature image of me planning by the fabulous Lauren at Sol + Co

Image of me at the Goddess Roadtrip initiatory sacred circle honouring the Goddess Isis by the wonderful Priestess and Beautiful You Coaching Academy founder, Julie Parker (so honoured)

inspiration & influence intuition love, loss & longing

Creative courage to move on in small steps – Tarot Narrative Monday 15 January 2018

January 15, 2018

You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage

to lose sight of the shore.

Christopher Columbus – via The Art of Life Tarot

This is the first of weekly Quiet Writing deep-dive Tarot Narratives each Monday to share intuitive guidance and the wisdom and insights from aligned books.

Eight of Swords

Reflections on 2017

Welcome to Quiet Writing for 2018! 2017 was a most challenging year for me. I spent the year focused on supporting my beautiful mother as she battled terminal illness in the form of metastatic breast cancer. She passed away peacefully on Christmas Day after the toughest time. It’s all so very raw still and in some ways, grief has yet to fully hit. My mum was very special to me and so many people. The time we spent together in 2017 was such a treasure and the memory of our time then and over the long term is helping to ease the sense of emptiness and loss now. But there’s a long way to go on this journey I know. More on this as I move through this time and reflect further on 2017.

At the same time, I was planning a new future knowing I needed to find a new career and life path focused on creativity. I trained as a Life Coach with the Beautiful You Coaching Academy to complement training I had already completed in Jung/Myers-Briggs personality type assessment. And I spent a lot of time diving deep into my intuition via tarot and oracle cards.

I worked on my spirituality and the sacred side of my creativity via work with Amber Adrian. I’ve learnt to listen within for guidance and seek help from spirit guides, angels and ancestors.

I wrote 50,000 words in November for NaNoWriMo, finally embracing writing every day and in challenging circumstances.

Also during the year, my job of 30 plus years as a leader in the government vocational education sector was ‘deleted’ and I am soon to be made ‘redundant’. Even though this is a change I desire as I already knew I needed to move on, it is not without its own pain and grief. Certainly, it’s a time of shifting identity, but it’s a shift I embrace wholeheartedly.

Overall, it was an incredibly transformative year, but one of chronic uncertainty with a deep underlying sadness.

Tarot and oracle work

One of the three key platforms in making this shift in life focus heading into 2017 was a deeper dive into tarot and oracle work as a way of honing my intuition. As an INTJ personality type, Introverted Intuition is my dominant gift and this was a time of really leaning into it to discover its mysteries. I studied tarot more deeply via Susannah Conway’s 78 Mirrors e-course and I began a daily practice of tarot and oracle reading and journaling.

In June, I began to share this practice publicly in the form of Tarot Narratives on Instagram and Facebook. Each day, I would do an intuitive reading of two tarot and one oracle card and write a narrative of the overall message. Then I’d link this intuitively to a book, quote or song and share it with others. There was such a positive response to this sharing of intuitive messages over time which I so appreciated.

I did this every day from June up until mid-December when it all became too much. Whilst it had been a supportive practice in a time of change until then, I was in the hospital with my mum day and night for long shifts and everything else simply had to stop.

Coming back to life generally and to tarot and oracle work following this time has been challenging and I’ve been rethinking so much. Sharing my Tarot Narrative each day was a great support in 2017 and a practice that helped shape my journey and sharpen my intuition. But it’s not a sustainable practice on a daily basis in 2018 as I work on crafting a new life and concurrently deal with grief and the impact of loss.

I’ve thought about how to balance Tarot Narrative work with my other priorities – writing, life coaching, personality type work. And I’ve decided to do a weekly deep-dive Tarot Narrative each Monday. It seems the best way to share intuitive guidance and book wisdom in a sustainable way. This means I can also provide more insights on the reading and especially exploring the aligned books, songs and quotes.

So here’s the first weekly Tarot and Oracle Narrative for 2018!

Theme for the week beginning 15 January

Firstly, I want to share a theme for each week to guide our overall focus. For this, I will work with Lisa McLoughlin’s Life Design Cards. With their emphasis on ‘weave a different story’, these cards align so well with Quiet Writing’s focus on ‘creating your story’.

The card for this week is 21. Use small and slow solutions.

Life Design Cards

I love this card with its spiral imagery centred around a snail making progress slowly against the backdrop of an ammonite fossil which seems to suggest a larger version of time. It’s true in one way, we have plenty of time. Time is an arbitrary man-made concept and something we can work with by making small steps and changes day by day.

I found a real sense of comfort in receiving this card. It made me reflect on how I have tried to work in 2017 in challenging times to just do something every day towards my overall goals. This is a practice that has served me well in this transition phase of life.

Making slow movements and small commitments will take you in the direction of your dreams incrementally. Even in the most challenging of times.

As the guidebook for Life Design Cards suggests for this card: “find a way to monitor progress so you can see how far you have come.” This is an excellent idea. Whether it be word count, books read, blog posts written, days writing, time spent on an activity of value, the number of clients or subscribers you have – find a metric or a few metrics that help measure your progress so you can notice it. It’s often easy to forget how far we have come. Take time to recognise the value of these small, slow solutions in your life so you feel inspired.

Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 15 January

Tarot Narrative

Embrace creative courage

You’re embracing creativity and leadership, the lessons of years evolving into now. Notice where you are holding yourself back, keeping yourself trapped or feeling safe, lacking in courage. See also where you might even be dulling the feelings, the excitement of opportunity, out of habit from times past. Embrace this creative time you’re crafting and the chance for mastery so you can cross the ocean into more prosperity and abundance.

Reading notes: Cards: Father (King) of Wands and Eight of Swords from The Wild Unknown Tarot and #51 Milk and Honey in protection (reversed) position from Wisdom of the Oracle.

Book notes:

Reading fiction as you commute to a job you don’t like will make you feel somewhat more fulfilled; being in the right job will make you feel incredible.

Laura Vanderkam, 168 Hours: You Have More Time than You Think

I’m reading Laura Vanderkam’s ‘168 Hours’ – listening as an audiobook as I drive. The book provides a fresh perspective on units of time, suggesting we focus on priorities and productivity over a week or 168 hours rather than the typical 24-hour unit focus.

Research based on logbook keeping suggests people over-estimate the time they spend on some tasks such as the hours they work. Laura Vanderkam suggests collecting your own data and having an evidence-based approach to decisions about how you spend your time.

In this, it’s valuable to look at the bigger picture of how we are choosing to live and whether we have the courage to make the changes we desire. Just as our theme for the week reminds us, using small, slow solutions to make change can be a valuable way of working.

For example, working on NaNoWriMo was a real opportunity to look at the metrics of how I use my time to write. The aim was to write 50,000 words in November. I achieved it by realising that this was 1667 words a day and learning that I could do this in under an hour. This realisation and metric made it doable and helped break through resistance. I could make practical strategies for finding an hour or 2 x 30-minute spots in the day to write even when life was super-challenging.

So for this week, maybe re-examine your weekly allocation of hours and see where your time goes. See if you can make some small, incremental changes in line with where you want to be, that job you wish to be in or that project you really want to tackle. Having the courage to lose sight of the shore, be in action and notice self-sabotaging behaviours can be powerful steps in moving into the career we desire or finally achieving our creative dreams. And in this we can also practice self-care as well.

Laura Vanderkam reminds us:

If you love what you do, you’ll have more energy for the rest of your life, too.

All best wishes for this week for moving on with courage in small steps closer to doing what you love. And let me know what you think of this post and the idea of weekly Tarot Narratives!

Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’

You can download my free 95-page ebook on the 36 Books that Shaped my Story – just sign up with your email address in the box to the right or below.  You will also receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes personality type, coaching, creativity, writing, tarot and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

Quiet Writing is on Facebook and Instagram – keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

You might also enjoy:

Practical tools to increase writing productivity

Creative and connected #12 – The courage to show up

20 practical ways of showing up and being brave (and helpful)

Intuition, writing and work – eight ways intuition can guide your creativity

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